EuroTube sets out to demonstrate that concrete, as a widely available construction material, is a suitable material for hyperloop and other high-speed transport infrastructure.
To that end, we are developing a concrete mixture together with zirkulit that has the required properties in terms of rigidity, workability (viscosity) for a complex mould, stability, and, in addition, sustainability.
Our concept involves minimizing the required material and thus thickness of the tube walls while retaining all the necessary parameters and reducing the material’s carbon footprint as far as possible.
Currently, we are testing several levers to reach this goal at once: a concrete mixture with recycled and recyclable aggregate, as well as a mould that can be used in local “mobile factories” close to the construction site, allowing a further reduction of the CO2 footprint by reducing transport requirements in the logistics chain of the tube fabrication.
Our first tests of this new concrete mixture in a complex small-scale mould with cast-in components like ducts for the post-tensioning cables were conducted over the last weeks together with zirkulit.
The test cycle involved viscosity measurements, pouring and curing various wall thicknesses of test moulds to determine the optimum steel fiber length and volume fraction concerning the desired casted component’s strength and homogeneity. To aim this, both visual and instrumental inspections are conducted. Subsequent cutting of the cured concrete shapes is used to measure if the concrete has correctly filled every crevice in the mould and that the aggregate and steel fibres are distributed evenly throughout the mould (concrete rheology). Beside that, standard samples are cast with the same mix to evaluate the temporal evolution of the compressive, tensile, and flexural strengths (2-40 days).
“The first test was very successful and we are generally satisfied with the properties of the material. Subsequent tests will involve more complex larger scale moulds with more cast-in components. This is the first time a concrete mixture designed for sustainability will be used to build high-speed infrastructure with all its static requirements,” says Saeed Abbasion, Senior Civil Engineer at the EuroTube Foundation.
Once the concrete mixture has been confirmed as suitable, it will be used for the fabrication of the GammaShellPipe, EuroTube’s first major scalable concrete component for the DemoTube hyperloop demonstrator.
